The Golden Globes Were an Awkward but Necessary Step Toward a Post-Weinstein Hollywood

Every story about the Golden Globes should begin with the same disclaimer: The Golden Globes don’t matter. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which votes on the Globes every year, is a group of about 90 journalists—whose work you’ve almost certainly never read, and whose criteria for selecting winners is secretive and probably corrupt.

But whether or not winning a Golden Globe means anything, this year’s ceremony carried a special importance. It was the first major Hollywood awards ceremony since October, when a pair of stories in The New York Times and The New Yorker detailed the long and horrifying history of sexual harassment and abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein, creating an ongoing ripple effect exposing the many, many other men in Hollywood who have similarly troubling pasts.

Any worthwhile Hollywood ceremony needs to tackle that subject head-on, and much of the Golden Globes felt, uncomfortably and atonally, like business as usual. We got James Franco bro-ing out with his bros onstage, wearing a "Time’s Up" pin without actually saying anything about the Time’s Up movement when he actually had a microphone in his hand. We got Aziz Ansari thanking a bunch of his Master of None collaborators while failing to mention Lena Waithe—who was at the center of his show’s best episode and, as writer Lili Loofbourow noted, has a new series premiering tonight that could have used the signal boost.

And we had Gary Oldman collecting a Golden Globe for playing Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour—despite his bashing the Golden Globes as "fucking ridiculous" and urging a boycott just a few years ago, and despite his own troubling history of alleged spousal abuse. In his acceptance speech, Oldman praised Darkest Hour as a film that "illustrates that words and actions can change the world—and boy oh boy, does it need some changing."

That’s the kind of vague, give-peace-a-chance platitude you’ve seen actors trot out at these awards shows for decades: a statement so blandly unobjectionable that it risks nothing because it could mean basically anything. This is how so many men in Hollywood have gotten away with paying lip service to a broadly progressive social agenda while utterly failing to implement any of it in their professional or personal lives.

But Gary Oldman’s business-as-usual win was, thankfully, the exception rather than the rule. Seth Meyers’ opening monologue had some wobbly moments, but it wasn’t the toothless, ain’t-I-a-stinker? level of satire employed by previous host Ricky Gervais. Meyers opened with a series of pointed barbs about the crimes of powerful white men in Hollywood, and threw some very direct punches at Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. Best of all, his monologue eventually gave way to an extended interruption by Amy Poehler, rolling her eyes at yet another apology from a white man.

But if Meyers found the right way to open a Hollywood awards show in a post-Weinstein world, it was the female presenters and winners who picked up the mantle. Presenter Jessica Chastain explicitly mentioned the 23 percent wage gap between men and women. A little later, Geena Davis suggested the crop of male nominees she was presenting donate half their salaries to women. I don’t want to overpraise these moments, because scripted jokes are not the same thing as concrete action—but acknowledgment of the problem, on one of Hollywood’s biggest and most front-facing stages, is a meaningful step.

Better still was Natalie Portman, veering off-script with the line "Here are the all-male nominees" as she presented the award for Best Director. At a self-congratulatory show like the Golden Globes—and at a time when it would be easy for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the celebrities in attendance to be patting themselves on the back for their woke-ness—it was a particularly well-timed reminder that there are systemic problems in Hollywood in which everyone is complicit.

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Most of all, there was Oprah, giving the speech that launched a million pleas that she just run for president already. "I want all the girls watching her, now, to know that a new day is on the horizon," she said, to a standing ovation.

Go back and watch that speech again. Look at all the famous people who stood up and applauded, and hold them accountable. As the beginning of a long-overdue reckoning, the Golden Globes were a necessary step. But it’s what comes next that really matters.

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